MSNBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams featured a story, Is the Pentagon Spying on Americans?, that should make all of us uneasy and should provide even more reason for moderate Representatives and Senators to call a halt to the overreaching powers provided by the so-called "Patriot" Act.
The story discusses a secret database established by the Pentagon, which is combing all available files for information on specific individuals and groups, supposedly in the hunt for domestic "terrorists." The Pentagon's post-9/11 beefed up domestic monitoring on behalf of "national security" includes a number of peaceful groups organized to protest war and military recruiting. One such group included in the "suspicious" persons database is a peace group that met at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida, a year ago to plan an activist campaign opposing military recruitment at high schools!
"A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period."
This database, and the rationales offered to justify it, are forebodingly reminiscent of the types of activities condoned by J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy at the height of the McCarthy era's attack on civilian dissent. Freedom of association doesn't exist if the daughter of a friend who happens to be along when someone gets arrested can be strip-searched (Alito supports that approach) and anyone attending a meeting to protest actions of the military-industrial complex is treated as a traitor and enemy of the country (the database suggests this is the basis for the notion of "threats", in line with Ari Fleischer's scary pronouncement shortly after 9/11 that those who didn't support the Administration's militaristic and anti-civil-liberties stance were unpatriotic supporters of the "enemy").
The Pentagon, of course, seldom responds to criticism with open information to allow ordinary Americans to pass judgment on the reasonableness of its action. It operates as a secretive and highly politicized division of the executive branch of government, claiming a right to hold U.S. citizens in its military brigs beyond the reach of press, counsel, or court. Not unexpectedly, it response to the news about the discovery of the 400 page document revealing its far-flung domestic spying on dissent undermining freedom of speech and association with typical mellifluous claims of acting honorably. (The military doesn't condone torture, remember--it just does it.)
"A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is 'properly collected' and involves 'protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.' "
Of course, the notion that the military can collect whatever domestic intelligence it wants so long as its purpose is to protect "Defense Department ...interests" is a broad one indeed. The Defense Department has already shown that it doesn't like dissent. Rumsfeld and Cheney have openly attacked dissent as unpatriotic. Mr. Bush has proclaimed that we Americans should view him first and foremost as a "War President" and suggested that label gives him unprecedented powers over us and our rights to know and to dissent. If domestic spying were acceptable so long as the Defense Department believes it is protecting its OWN interests and not the interests of the American people, then a database on every single American who has ever voiced criticism of military installations, recruitment, strategies and actions would be legitimate and free speech would be essentially a dead letter of the law.
This Pentagon view of dissent as a "threat" is typical of dictatorships like Saddam Hussein's, not democracies. Democracy is, in fact, not sustainable without an informed and active government opposition that constantly brings pressure on government officials to act for the public good rather than for the special interests of the few, the rich, and the connected.
Groups like our own VoBA are, in fact, the quintessential feature of a real democracy--local, grassroots efforts to be informed and to inform others about the issues that matter in sustaining our values, our environment, and most of all our cherished liberties. VoBA members have participated in anti-war rallies, protested media consolidation, informed each other and our local community about excess corporate greed, rallied in support of military families left suffering an unfathomable loss because of a pre-emptive war of choice, protested the despicable, pervasive military and intelligence use of torture, highlighted the untoward treatment of the poor by federal agencies, decried corrupt cronyism that threatens the core values of democracy, and objected strenuously to White House and Defense propaganda that intends to pull a curtain down over truthtelling in American and international media. If that is a threat to the military, then the military itself is a threat to American democracy.
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